give me toil in my larp: gamification & science fiction (diversity in science fiction, loncon3,...

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Toil in my LARP: Science Fiction & Gamification

Jo Lindsay Walton / [email protected] / @jolwalton

Introduction to Gamification (1/25)

Sources: Kapp, The Gamification of Learning and Instruction (Pfeiffer 2012), p. 10; Deterding, Dixon, Khaled and Nacke, From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining “Gamification” (Mindtrek 2011).

•Gamification: the use of “game-based mechanics, aesthetics and game thinking to engage people, motivate action, promote learning, and solve problems” (Karl M. Kapp).

•Alternative definition: “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts” (Deterding et al.).

•Core examples include Nike+, Khan Academy.

•Associated buzz: crowdsourcing, serious gaming and quantified self.


Khan Academy An iron on Facebook


Source: Tim Maughan, “Zero Hours” (2013)

“The manager reaches Nicki, presents her with the QRcode. She scans it. Chimes and kerchings.Shift completed!£19.24 received.Achievement unlocked!Shelf Stacker Pro Level 2 badge!”


Source: Quoted in Quitney Anderson and Rainie, “Gamification: Experts expect ‘game layers’ to expand in the future, with positive and negative results” (2012), Pew Research Center

•By 2020, “anyone who ever used the term ‘gamification’ will be embarrassed to admit it” (Alex Halavais).


Source: Jane McGonigal paraphrasing Herodotus in Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Random House (2011).

•Herodotus describes how ca.1100 BCE “the Lydians devised a strange remedy for their problem. The plan adopted against the famine was to engage in games one day so entirely as not to feel any craving for food . . . and the next day to eat and abstain from games.”

Chore Wars: gamified housework (9/25)

Chore Wars: gamified housework (10/25)

The Modern Health Crusade: A National Program of Health Instruction in Schools; Manual for Teachers, Superintendents and Health Workers, National Tuberculosis Association (1922)

(11/25)

Chore Wars: the mock heroic (12/25)

Simon Jarvis, “Mock as screen and optic,” Critical Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 3

“Why must Nigel Slater raid his garden when, so far as one knows, it belongs to him? Not, we are to gather, because he wants to magnify himself – this would be an involuntary burlesque – but because he wants to make gentle fun of himself. Certainly, when this man eats his tomatoes he leaves ‘gaping wounds’. The kitchen is a battlefield. But the reader is not really supposed to notice any of this. It is not anything so marked as a joke; it is a sleight of register effecting a background hum, an atmosphere – one which, as it turns out, does not consist only of mild self-deprecation, but also of increased intensity, even of mild heroism” (Simon Jarvis).

Tom Sawyer’s fence (14/25)

Source: Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Gamification: a summary (15/25)

•Gamification may have a strong link with digital technology, but it isn’t exclusively a digital phenomenon

•Gamification may have a strong link with disciplinarity, but it is also implicated in individual self-expression, whether self-fashioning or resistance to disciplinarity

•In particular, it is implicated in making toil tolerable

•Cf. de Certeau’s “tactics,” Rancière’s “redistribution of the sensible,” Bloch’s utopian impulse, Ulrich Beck’s subpolitics

Bonus name-dropping for fast

readers!

•Integration: a speculative fiction novel•A thesis focusing on genealogical money•A comprehensive public archive of all monetary trails

1. IntroductionIain (M.) Banks and Gamification (16/25)

• Gamification anachronistic when talking about the Culture series, but still suggestive

• E.g. work in the Culture “indistinguishable from play, or from a hobby” (Notes on the Culture)

• Gamification doesn’t produce games exactly?

• Or does it? Maybe gamification gurus tacitly have a narrow range of games in mind.

• But think of the variety of Banks’s games . . .



• Gamification anachronistic when talking about the Culture series, but still suggestive

• E.g. work in the Culture “indistinguishable from play, or from a hobby” (Notes on the Culture)

• Gamification doesn’t produce games exactly?

• Or does it? Maybe gamification gurus tacitly have a narrow range of games in mind (commercially competitive digital games).

• But think of the variety of Banks’s games . . .


1. Introduction

• The Wasp Factory (1984) – most of the story•Walking on Glass (1985) – assaulting the puzzle scullion (82)• Consider Phlebas (1987) – Damage• The Player of Games (1988) – Azad•Use of Weapons (1990) – the origins of the Chairmaker atrocity in childhood rivalry (144)

• The Crow Road (1992) – Lewis and Prentice’s repurposing of the River Game (270)

• Complicity (1993) – Yvonne and Cameron’s rape role-play sex game (125-130)

• Excession (1996) – Affront’s batball sport, played with a living shuttlecock (153)

• Inversions (1998) – murderous Ort hunting (212) • Look to Windward (2000) – lava-rafting (149); Chomba’s ambassadorial role (144)

• The Algebraist (2004) – Luciferius’s punching bag; Dweller child hunts

• The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007) – Empire! • Surface Detail (2010) – Purdil decapitated during tag in the river maze (338-339)

• Stonemouth (2012) – paintballing and the death of Wee Malkie• See interviews in 1996 (Ricketts) and 1989 (Garnett)

Banks’s games: play, violence and coercion (18/25)


1. Introduction

Screenshot from Diablo III

Game influence in Banks’s Surface Detail (19/25)


1. Introduction

•Walking on Glass (1985) – Grout has the answer Quiss needs in the Castle of Bequest

• Consider Phlebas (1987) – the leaking feels of Damage• The Player of Games (1988) – Azad (“whoever succeeds at the game succeeds in life” (76))

• The Use of Weapons (1990) – cf. Sma’s poem about Zakalwe “playing our game for real” (2)

• Complicity (1993) – the heavy allegory of Despot (261-262) and Xerium (135-136)?

• Inversions (1998) – the ort hunt; Perud and DeWar’s board game sessions

• The Business (1999) – wee Kate Telman’s recruitment• The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007) – Empire! • Surface Detail (2010) – the simulation-fought war between pro-Hell and anti-Hell factions which spills into reality; the children’s game among the gunboats leading to an actual death

• Stonemouth (2012) – Wee Malky’s death whilst paintballing (157); Phelpie’s catastrophic attempt to transfer a Poker skill

Banks’s games: overspilling, overlapping, nested (20/25)


1. IntroductionBanks’s games: intersections, not systems? (21/25)

• For instance, Chinese Scrabble in Walking on Glass

• Strongly implied that one player has learned Chinese, the other one hasn’t

• Compare John Searle’s Chinese Room: socially indistinguishable behaviours may correlate to very different forms of consciousness (or no consciousness at all)


六六 six red六六 game balls六六 when broken六六 sixty-six六六 a listen六六 listen to the word六六 of that六六 the disc六六 train六六 fire eight六六 fire factory

六六 several plant六六 opening loss六六 small mouth六六 hill六六 blade child六六 edge learning六六 special CD六六 anti treasure六六 anti-sound六六 anti-breaking六六 anti-Left



• For instance, Chinese Scrabble in Walking on Glass

• Strongly implied that one player has learned Chinese, the other one hasn’t

• Compare John Searle’s Chinese Room: socially indistinguishable behaviours may correlate to very different forms of consciousness (or no consciousness at all)

Quasi-games: improvised & ingenious instantiation (24/25)

•Instantiation as the counterpart to representation: representational systems are instantiated in physical systems•The Algebraist (2004) – semantic sex between Beyonder agents (also cf. the Dweller List encoded in the [spoiler])•The Crow Road (1992) – pelvic squeeze Morse code•Use of Weapons (1990) – Zakalwe’s ‘Mayday’ pictogram crawled through bird droppings; the climactic chair•Excession (1996) – Sisela Ytheleus’ Kamikazee graffiti on the Affronter hull•The Business (1999) – Mike Daniels’ missing teeth are a [spoiler] •Banks as a materialist (cf. e.g. his deliberate privileging of matter over the Land of Infinite Fun in Excession)

Iain (M.) Banks & Gamification: a summary (25/25)

• Games that are just no fun• Games that are dangerous, coercive, involuntary

• Games with uncertain thresholds, prone to transgression and overspill

• Games which overlap or are nested inside other games

• Games in which participants may not be playing “the same” game

• Games improvised from the materials at hand (including other games)

• The vast, grand scale of space opera treated subversively in Consider Phlebas: does anything that happens in the novel actually matter?

• How can we know the “true moral context” of our actions?

• Part of why games are so seductive: a tidy, bounded arena in which to accomplish good things – unlocked achievements don’t get locked up again!

• Even if we are poor candidates (epistemologically) for meaningful moral action, perhaps we can always change ourselves

• Science fiction and fantasy loves to promote the power of narrative, play and imagination

• But in Banks’s work, gamesmay be flexible and omnipresent, but they are imperfect ways of grasping this complex material reality: they never substitute for it

Overspill & Transgression! (26/25)

Thank you!

Jo Lindsay Walton / [email protected] / @jolwalton

Thank you!

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Gamification: a little bit redefined?

• Recognise the complex and contradictory implication of gamification in …— disciplinarity and control, but also the long history of collective struggle for better working conditions

— coping, subversion, the tactics individuals use to evade and transform toil

• Recognise that any concerted effort to gamify something …— doesn’t start with a “raw” ungamified practice, but practices already inscribed with all kinds of playful and systematising powers

— must anticipate that gamification will continue afterwards (“the street finds its own uselessness”)

Games within games

• Individual agency within the grand scale of space opera (cf. Consider Phlebas and Use of Weapons especially)

• A partial answer: you can always change yourself

• Gamification is both bottom-up and top-down: both coping tactics and disciplinarity

• The raw input to gamification have already been shaped by these processes, and will continue to be shaped by them


Banks and Games• Will Slocombe, “Games Playing Roles in Banks’ Fiction,” in Colebrook and Cox (eds.), The Transgressive Iain Banks (Macfarlane 2013).

• Edge Staff, “Iain Banks: My Favourite Game” (2013). An interview with Banks for Edge: www.edge-online.com/features/iain-banks-my-favourite-game/

• Oisin Murphy-Lawless, “Iain Banks: A Player of Games” (2013). A short article for the Scottish Book Trust: www.scottishbooktrust.com/blog/reading/2013/08/iain-banks-a-player-of-games

• Cairns, Craig. 2002. “Player of Games: Iain M. Banks, Jean-François Lyotard and Sublime Terror.” James Acheson and Sarah C.E. Ross (eds.), The Contemporary British Novel Since 1980. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 229-239.

• Many panels / events at this WorldCon!

… and vice-versa?

• The vast, grand scale of space opera treated subversively in Consider Phlebas: does anything that happens in the novel actually matter?

• How can we know the “true moral context” of our actions?

• Part of why games are so seductive: a tidy, bounded arena in which to accomplish good things – unlocked achievements don’t get locked up again!

• Even if we are poor candidates (epistemologically) for meaningful moral action, perhaps we can always change ourselves

‘There is a grain to the fabric of space-time,’ she said. ‘A scale on which there is no further divisible smoothness, only individual, irreducible quanta where reality itself seethes with a continual effervescence of sub-microscopic creation and destruction. I believe there to be a similarly irreducible texture to morality, a scale beyond which it is senseless to proceed. Infinity goes in only one direction; outward, into more inhabited worlds, more shared realities. In the other direction, on a reducing scale, once you reach the level of an individual consciousness – for all practical purposes, a single human being – you can usefully reduce no further. It is at that level that significance lies. If you do something to benefit one person, that is an absolute gain, and its relative insignificance in the wider scheme is irrelevant.’

Iain [M.] Banks (2009), Transition (146)

… and vice-versa?

1. IntroductionBorders that Flicker and Ripple

•It’s easy to see games everywhere you look

•Cf. Homo Ludens (1938), foundational ludological research of Johan Huizinga. Play is seen as a universal element in human culture.

•But could there be something special about the concept “games”?

1. Introduction Games and Coercion

•Wittgenstein: games have “family resemblance”

•Bernard Suits: a game is “a voluntary attempt to overcome unecessary obstacles” (shorter of two definitions offered by Suits)

1. Introduction Games and Coercion

•(Bernard Suits also has a more precise definition: “To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]”)


1. IntroductionHow else can we define gamification?

• “Any institutionalisation of ways of working which doesn’t prioritise productivity”

• Maybe gamification doesn’t require technology?


1. Introduction

• Making something more like a game

• Using technology to make something more like a game

Gamification: an alternative definition? (2)


1. Introduction

From Chessmen of Mars (1922)

Edgar Rice Burroughs – Jetan


1. IntroductionIain (M.) Banks and Gamification

• The core sense of gamification still involves companies using digital technology to get individuals to do things they would not otherwise do

• But we should see that core sense of gamification in the context of the diffuse, various and perpetual activity of subjects to texture their world, both through play and with an instinct for future opportunities for play

give me toil in my larp: gamification & science fiction (diversity in science fiction, loncon3,...

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